A/N – Written for hossgal in the 2007 Yuletide Challenge. I've, uh, never had my life consumed so completely by any single writing project. (But perhaps I shouldn't have left it to the last week, aha.) This is dedicated to her in every way imaginable.
o1. Sand Ocean
On the golden fringe of Hamunaptra, where the sun rises like a firebrand and night comes down in deadly silver veils: a chorus of shadows linger beyond the toppled ruins, watching generation by generation as the desert sifts slowly over temple steps and the faces of the gods. Thunder, fire and rubble in repose; the years have been unkind. Broken colonnades press the surface like a high, notched spine, burned copper and coral in the whirling heat of three thousand years' decay. All streets lead to the wasteland, and the City of the Dead is in its death throes. Arid voices whisper up against its flanks, a burning tongue moves soft and destructive across the emerging bones.
The bones, the bones, Anubis leers, his scarred stone features worn soft and terrible; faceless, he casts long, cold shadows across the boiling sand. I lick these bones forever, I hold them before judgement. They do not belong to you.
They are cursed bones, secret bones, hooks for treacherous flesh scratched from the flanks of the world; but the desert has always been a greedy creature. It slithers into closed spaces, breaks barriers and builds new ones. Patiently, it smoothes the skin and drains the fluids, always feeding, never full.
It is part of the old dance, the rising hand and the destruction: the desert is always hungry, always.
From their sanctuary in the dunes, the Medjai are more than satisfied to see it feast.
o2. A Frieze of Black Horses
She is growing old and she cannot live forever, but Ardeth Bey will always remember the great black mare Tahish as a flurry of darkness crowning the dunes. She came to him an outcast, her deathly pale forelegs gleaming like scimitars whetted on the desert's crooked teeth. She was calling down sandstorms, thundering through the smoke and the howl as though she might be the last living thing in the world, a sable silhouette roaming in citadels of dust. With her desert blood and sleek, powerful beauty, she is the envy of every horseman Ardeth Bey has ever met. He has been offered gifts and treasures to ornament her bridle and mane; silver bells to string across her chest, torsades and tassels to rest on her slender brow, silk ribbons, baubles made of ivory and sapphire, pearls and opals, vials of scented oil, scarves and drapings embroidered with a vivid prism of designs in every colour.
He has turned them all away, courteously whenever it was possible. Those who approached with any hope of bargaining for her ownership were discouraged more forcefully. Ardeth Bey has known for a very long time that he would kill to keep her, and that she is just as eager to kill for his sake; she was a quick study of the incitement, rearing and slashing with dark delight at his signal.
Besides her leather tack, she wears only a dark blanket and a finely woven browband to shade her eyes, both acquired fairly from a Bedouin woman who met them near an oasis and stopped at a respectful distance to admire Tahish's stride. This is all she needs; perhaps more to the point, this is all she will tolerate. She has no appetite for jewels or garish, heavy tapestries. Her grace is all speed and savagery, and she moves with a rhythm that even the desert must struggle to tame.
While other horses froth and panic in the old, sighing courtyards of Hamunaptra, Tahish paces calmly through the ruins, choosing her path as though she might remember the city from the age when fire blazed on every stone balcony against the velvet press of twilight, the ancient metropolis at the trembling peak of its glory.
o3. Jackal Mask
The statue of Anubis spoke to him when he was young.
The creature curses you by name in dreams of his death, it had said to him as he approached, and though it was a drab thing leaning rather awkwardly in a quiet, barren quarter of the city, Ardeth Bey found himself transfixed by the pitted gray eyes, with their ledge of crystal sand that shone like tears.
He should not have been where he was, and he knew that. However, it seemed to him that when a god spoke - even and especially if it was one of the very old gods - a man must answer. "God of the Underworld, Judge of Souls; how does it know my name?"
I, Anubis replied benignly, have told him.
Ardeth Bey had stared at the god then, at its pointed jackal's face and weathered shoulders, and he saw something move, skittering on the edge of his perceptions; a taut muscle, a flicker and clench of narrow jaws. In one sense, he had always believed in Anubis and Amun Ra and the cursed creature sleeping fitfully in the sand and the history of Egypt as it had been before his time; but in another, he was a young man like any other, skeptical and eager to outdo tradition. "Then also tell it that hell is waiting, and I will gladly be the one to send it back there when the time comes."
Tahish had been younger then, too. She pranced a circle where he had left her, whistled a sharp, disapproving note.
Anubis was grinning; Ardeth Bey could hear it in the silken, smouldering rhythms of his voice. Your predecessors had some fear in them, but you are all sinew and insolence. How fortunate. How glorious. A hot wind lifted sand sharply against the exposed skin between his cheekbone and brow, and it glittered and stung, and his eyes had watered. I will tell him that.
o4. Creation Myths
Eager to fulfill a threat made before the darkest of ancient gods, Ardeth Bey trained his hands and instincts in the desert with his kindred among the Medjai, dark men and women inked with the puzzle-and-labyrinth tattoos. He wore the somber robes, and learned to see hidden paths in the tough scrub and shifting hills, even with all the fire of heaven mantled over his shoulders. He drew blood and had his blood drawn until the speckled sand frothed underfoot. He curried his tall, elegant mare alongside lesser beasts, rode her viciously down desolate arroyos and flats with the wolf-gray and sorrel stallions of two elder Medjai panting at her heels, always a long stride behind. He had lived with the warrior tribe all his life, was raised by able, bloodthirsty Mada-Ne himself, and so was glad to observe even the most violent of their traditions.
And yet Mada-Ne had been careful to breed some subtlety into him as a child. The Medjai of Seti's time, Pharaoh's personal guard, may not have needed much more than weapons training and a nasty temper to be effective, but that world had gone with him and his sons and all the sons of kings and bandits in the Black Lands; their great, savage palace shook with echoes of their passage; the desert was a seething chamber of ghosts.
Their orders had never been clear, Mada-Ne said; they spoke like immortals, but must not have thought like them. The Pharaohs were sleeping in their gilt sarcophagi, deep under sliding shale and soot, their blackened hands curled around crumbling talismans. None still lived to say what should be done after millennia of strange tranquility, where the glory of the adversary had gone, whether or not the implementation of a curse like the Hom Dai could ever be justified.
So the Medjai have circled their corpses like vultures and thieves ever since, dreaming of whispers. They have no Pharaoh to protect. They have, instead, their stubborn faith, their spoken history and their loyalty to the threat of catastrophe.
It was just as well, Ardeth Bey thought in later years, that Mada-Ne praised curiosity and a sharp mind beyond even the most precise arc of a blade.
o5. Ex Libris
Even as a restless young man, he understood that swords and firearms were not the only weapons he should bring to bear against a thing that had lived and suffered longer than he could imagine, so Ardeth Bey studied the Kingdoms and dynasties; and he did it by sneaking into the private archives at the library in Cairo.
It was around this time that old Cairo rediscovered its youth, or at least learned enough about the art of the mirage to hide its age behind a clever veneer. The cobbled streets wore heat and haze with a pretentious sort of dignity, twisting the sunlight through mirrored corridors, dressing the naked earth in ceramics and silk. So this, he had thought, this is where the radiance of old Memphis and Thebes has come to settle.
He could navigate it as though the buildings were cliffsides and civilization was a sighing canyon that trapped the sky like a river of sapphires above him. He had not dared to bring Tahish, but he remembered wandering into such a place astride her, entering a world of shadows and membranes with her steady hoofbeats resounding like a distant heart. That canyon had led them directly to water; so the streets of Cairo brought him into the city's center, and he had found the Museum of Antiquities raised like a palace and plated with the sort of lust that had nothing to do with flesh or hunger.
The hallways were shining caverns. He moved through them like the shadow of a dune, easing away from any watchful, burning eye, and he found the books singing on their oakwood shelves. At first, Ardeth Bey had only crept through the hush, touching stamped spines and deciphering titles with his fingertips as much as his eyes. Eventually he began to read, and he found that there were more books waiting to be opened than he could even have hoped to count. He felt himself divided, a wraith caught between the city and the great maw of the old world. And he knelt, holding the books as though they were made of glass, and he scarcely bothered to look up when he sensed another presence; such was the power of the words, humming in his chest as if the dead were drawing breath through him, alive again. The curator drew up beside him, graceful and silent as a swooping falcon.
"You read," he commented, sounding abstractly pleased.
As it turned out, he was a scholar and an indulgent, observant man; and, most of all, he was Medjai.
"Our kind have many talents," Ardeth Bey had said simply. And nothing more was said about the intrusion. Out of fear of the desert faction, or perhaps approval of an academic warrior, the curator did not try to discourage him in any way. In time he came to answer questions, recommend titles, ask for favours that only a swift, grim-faced youth could carry out in a city as colourfully populated as Cairo.
When Ardeth Bey was admitted into the warrior's circle, the fundamental tradition of the Medjai, the curator brought out a book from his personal collection. It was small and bound in brown leather. All the pages were blank.
"Yours to keep," he said. "A reminder that the desert is more than a dry place, the Medjai are far more than bodyguards or mercenaries, and that there are many kinds of thirst. It may not be the Book of Amun Ra, but deadly spells aren't the only things worth the record. Accounts of warfare, science and mathematics, scripture, biographies. You've seen it. All of history!" He smiled then, and Ardeth Bey never forgot the sincerity of it. A genuine smile for all the fables and fabrications ever written to disguise the truth. "You and I still have no idea how wonderful and repulsive it can be."
o6. Sun
Ardeth Bey called the creature by its old name reflexively. For the first time in three thousand years, it was addressed as the man it had once been.
In the ancient tongue, it had answered: "What?" And then it looked around with stolen eyes, bemused, and saw him.
The other Medjai stalked forward with torches raised. Firelight slicked its tattered skin, trailing in the filthy sand like bleak, rotten wings. Its shadow trembled and twitched, but it had only stood there, regarding them, one mealy hand knotted in the American's hair. After a moment, it dropped him and left, sluicing off down the black corridors with a death rattle and startling grace.
They never spoke again, and Ardeth Bey never had the opportunity to harm it, perhaps never even had the courage to try. He considers his youthful boast to Anubis an embarrassment, but he does not regret it entirely.
At the foot of the statue of Horus, when Evelyn had been taken and he suddenly found himself far more concerned with the safety of the living than he was with the imprisonment of a corpse, he decided his own life was less than hers, and there would be no prestige or virtue in killing the creature that wore the shape of a priest called Imhotep. It simply needed to be killed.
So said the jackal, Horus had remarked, his voice glimmering in the ragged, curdled darkness, swift as flight. He was right about you.
o7. Moon
"What, old relics like us? You're kidding." Rick swats fondly at his son's hair. "Next time the world needs saving, Alex can do it."
"Yeah," Alex scoffs. He says it, however, with a note of wistful pride that Ardeth Bey finds oddly familiar. He takes a closer look at the tawny boy tracing out his indigo tattoos, extending the lines over the wrist and fingers, circling the joints. From the hush of memory, Mada-Ne recites the little weaknesses of the mortal body, chants a summoning for the grip that makes hands unbreakable.
"Start reading about the undead," he says lightly. "Tell your mother that you have taken an interest in archaeology and the intangible. I'll show you how to sneak into the private collections at the museum library."
Lamplight pours liquid over the boy's narrow shoulders. He flicks a keen glance between both men, his eyes glinting metallic and clever. "Dad, you seriously need to write some of this down. Your status as role model is being threatened."
"And I need to give your tutor a hard time. This is too much. What kind of a twelve year old uses the words 'status' and 'threatened' in one sentence?"
"Can I go live with Ardeth?"
"Ask your mother."
Alex scrambles up from the carpet in a tumult of thin limbs and spiraling, golden light. "I'm actually going to do it," he announces, and bolts from the room.
Once the beat of his slight steps has faded, Rick lifts his eyebrows and puts both feet up on a distressingly elaborate coffee table that matches the wall paneling and bookcases, the floorboards and balustrades. Ardeth Bey had been somewhat distracted on his first visit to the O'Connell household; now that he has the opportunity to observe a little more casually, he finds himself perplexed by the obvious decadence draped from every available surface. It's an unusual setting for Rick; he still has his boots on, and there are dusty impressions leading all across the lush carpet. As a guest, Ardeth Bey knows that he has no right to question the decor, but – always astute – Rick answers him anyway.
"Let it never be said that I'm tactless," he declares, leaning back into the richness of dark upholstery and embroidered cushions, "but her family's loaded." A thought occurs to him and he glances sharply over his shoulder. "Don't tell Evie I'm doing this, by the way."
Ardeth Bey holds up his hands. "Never."
Light footsteps, returning. Rick slips his feet down again quickly, asks without looking back, "What'd she say?"
"She said no," Evelyn replies, and she smacks the back of his head perhaps a little too hard to be playful, and then she smiles like the full glory of dawn, all pale skin and tame, trailing darkness. Ardeth Bey stands to greet her and is mildly surprised when she immediately embraces him. "But it's so good to see you."
"And you," he murmurs.
Alex drops back onto the floor beside his chair. "Worth a try."
Ardeth Bey shrugs, palms his shoulder. "It's just as well. The desert is a boring place."
Evelyn folds up her lips to stop a chuckle. Vacantly, Rick adds: "Boring and full of walking dead stuff."
An easy cadence comes into their voices gradually. Ardeth Bey notes it with interest; it sounds and feels almost like speaking another language. There is a closeness here, a sense of intense belonging that binds these three people together and even draws outsiders nearer and nearer with no misgivings, whirling like dusty moths directly into a flame. The banter and arguments and negotiations all run along a single stream, a range of tone and vocabulary unique to the family. The individual words dissolve, the details dwindle; and, beneath, there is a current moving like a deep water hunter, far beyond Ardeth Bey's ability to comprehend. He notes the ease with which Jonathan – still heavy-lidded when he joins them at noon – steps into the flow and sequence. It does not break for an instant, not when Evie berates him, not when he mutters and shuffles past her to head for the kitchen.
Ardeth Bey recognizes that he is not an essential part of this current. He can never quite touch the shining thing suspended between Evie and her brother, Jonathan and his nephew, all the networked contacts; but they allow him to move freely through the soft chambers of their companionship. He considers this a very particular form of trust, and wonders at the strength of the bond, wonders if it could ever be built among people who had shared space only as guardians of a feared and reviled object.
"What will you do now?" Evelyn asks at length, and though she makes the question innocuous, Ardeth Bey can tell that she has thought about it as well. What does a clan built on one, desperate purpose do when their contract has been completed? He has no real answer, but for her peace of mind he must choose something to say, and finally he says this:
"I've found more answers than I have questions out in the sands. Often they belong to some vanished lineage, or to cities that have forgotten where it was they came from, but some are meant for my people. We will find our way as we always have. The desert loves its young."
o8. Judgement
Perhaps Hamunaptra is the last place in the world that he should want to go, but it has always felt like a starting point of sorts and he is looking for something similar to a beginning or an end. In fact, he has no idea where else to go; the desert is home, but his purpose is no longer there. And who else should a man with no purpose wish to see more than a god?
Tahish takes him into the heart of the city fearlessly. She draws to the side once or twice as if to say: what's the point? But she respects him, so she does not hesitate.
The debris and the slavering, unstoppable dunes and the statue are unchanged. Hamunaptra's familiar coils unwind around him like a frozen serpent. Overhead, the wind cries bare and breathless in a piercing sky that grins like a pane of shattered glass.
Be vigilant, Anubis says softly, and his voice is an echo of half-forgotten scents: jasmine, wood smoke, crushed rose, embalming fluids. His presence and the rasping of dust on rock invokes a sense of the ancient, a clutch of power built on all the time that has passed, the days and nights and lives. Ardeth Bey imagines that this is meant to soothe or compel, but there is venom creeping in his blood; the serpent has finally struck. He will not be turned aside, not by beguiling music nor twisting, golden wisps of fire nor visions of a burnished palace rising from the dead earth like a sacred forest.
"There is nowhere left for us to go." It comes out sounding like an accusation.
There is everywhere left for you to go. I could give the beautiful legion another way to destroy you, but I think perhaps that you can manage such a small thing yourself.
"Are you a god truly?"
I believe so, Anubis replies, and then there is laughter shuddering in every shard of broken stone, in each of the soft footsteps melting back into the sand, bright as water. Around them, the desert falls to silver dust.
"Then you have the advantage," Ardeth Bey says coldly.
Jackals are baying in the night, because the sun is ash.
All of you, Anubis says thoughtfully. You are so little, and so unaware of being little. And such lovely dreams visit you all the same.
"This is not a dream."
Is it not? The god says it with the high authority of a king and father; his scavenger brood lapses; the racing wind falters, the stars come out.
"You will believe me," Ardeth Bey answers evenly, "when I say that I know dreams."
The laughter is different this time. Softer. The illusory night suddenly splinters, as though a door has been thrown open.
Judgement. Affection makes the word warm, roaming, harsh; it is nearly lost to the rush of sunlight that moves like a lean, roaring lion over the golden channels and dunes. Remember that.
Ardeth Bey considers it: the jackal face, the sentiment. "Even if you command us to leave, we will not."
I have, Anubis whispers, hearts to weigh. Farewell, Ardeth Bey of the Medjai, dark rider in the Black Lands.
The sky exhales, saved from asphyxiation; and as the desert comes back to itself, it feels Hamunaptra as an absence in its side, the remnant of an amputation, a city well and truly dead.
o9. The King Is Dead
He has come to the conclusion that leadership is not necessarily the mark of a good or honest man, but he will not let this discourage his hopes, his willingness to lead, even through silence and famine, if it becomes necessary. There may be long droughts of faith ahead, doubts that will threaten to leave them wandering aimlessly along the ancient riverbeds, dragging history and their heritage behind them like desiccated limbs, vulnerable to the driving sands and the creeping black scorpions haunting every golden hollow.
Sometimes he will allow himself to wonder if the Medjai can last as a cohesive clan.
Sometimes, riding along the edge of the escarpments at dusk, he will still hear the laughter of the old gods glittering in motes of molten light.
But sometimes is not a promise or an oath. Sometimes does not resonate with the Pharaoh's guardians, standing sentinel over his kingdom long after the great monuments have vanished.
He remembers who and what they are, where they have been, where they will go. He remembers the centuries, as if he might have lived them all through the stories and songs and lullabies traded over the campfires like precious beads of water.
The darkening sky flashes with fierce, startling light.
Rain is coming.
1o. Long Live The King
He knows that it can only be a small, rogue cloudform that skidded down the slippery ribbon of the Nile by some accident of the wind, but it has a flavour of fate about it, a vivid stroke of intention trailing like seafoam vapours from the fingers of a god.
Tahish flicks her ear. Sky gods, desert gods. Never mind the names, the names. We all believe.
Rain soothes the open sores on the red cliffsides, softens the bright, hard heart of the sun descending. Even bruised by storms, the sky raises dunes and escarpments in high, ashen silhouette until all the light has gone from the world. Nearby, there are voices swimming in the gold globes that glimmer through the flaps and layers of a firefly city of tents, and the horses gossip and chuckle amongst themselves, and falcons chirrup in delight at some new treat or game of a dark, capable child's invention.
Ardeth Bey looks out at the dusky reaches of desert lying open before him. No sign of gods or carnivores, no putrid figures looming in the back of his mind. There is only the sand and the broken mountains, whispering white in a brief glimpse of the stars overhead. There is watery, silver music in the dark, the tentative promise of pale flowers by dawn.
"Isn't it strange," he says to the settling night.
It is a statement more than a question. He does not expect an answer. He does not particularly want one.
Tahish stirs in her sleep, dreaming of endless fields and tall river reeds to sweep against her flickering sides.
Sphinx
But just before he leaves, Ardeth Bey pauses, produces a small book from his dark, braided robes and says to her: "I think your family should have this."
Evelyn shakes her head, feeling something very much like dread catching in the back of her throat. In all the world, Ardeth Bey is the one person whom she had hoped would never offer her anything of his own. It feels wrong to refuse, and worse to accept. She begins to explain, we owe you more than we could possibly repay in one lifetime, but he takes her hand and puts it around the old leather spine. It's warm in her palm, like sunstretched skin. "It was given to me a very long time ago, and it was a gift. What else could I give to such good people, to a Medjai brother and his loved ones? Pretend I have no more use for it."
And though Evie still has trouble believing in or fate or reincarnation or the ancient pantheons of gods, she waits until Ardeth Bey has released her, clasped arms with her husband and brother and son, bid them all a courteous good night and disappeared into the darkness like the soft, dry whisper of wings before she finally opens the book in her hands.
All at once, Rick and Alex and Jonathan are hovering at her sides like a flight of strange birds, and they want to know what it says inside, and she only smiles, because she already knows the words somehow. She knows as if she had written them herself.
"On the golden fringe of Hamunaptra," she says, putting it into Alex's eager hands, "where the sun rises like a firebrand and night comes down in deadly silver veils."